World of Warcraft: Legion’s success could carry over to Battle for Azeroth

World of Warcraft’s seventh expansion, Battle for Azeroth, launches later today. I’m excited, but I’m also feeling a bit retrospective and even sad. This marks the end of Legion, the previous expansion, which became one of my favorite times in the 14-year-old online multiplayer role-playing game’s history.

Legion came out on August 30, 2016. Every fan knew that it would be a crucial expansion. Its predecessor, Warlords of Draenor, was a miss. Its convoluted story involved time travel and alternate dimensions, and its endgame content felt sparse, with few raids and dungeons that didn’t give enough rewards. Warlords of Draenor also put a large emphasis on a new Garrison system, which had you creating and maintaining your own base. But you had little room to customize your Garrison, and the new digs also separated you from the rest of the world. Visiting players were infrequent at best. World of Warcraft is a multiplayer game, so having a major system focus so much on isolation felt off.